A bite-marked Apatosaurus pubis, in bone and in bronze

MWC 861 in bone (left) and in bronze (right).

Here’s a cool comparo. I was on the road recently, and since I was passing through Fruita, Colorado, I got some photos of my old friends MWC 861 and MWC 4011, a pubis and ischium, respectively, of Apatosaurus, with deep bite marks on their distal ends from a big theropod, probably Allosaurus (you may remember these awesome specimens from previous posts). That’s MWC 861 above on the left. 

A week later I was passing through Tucumcari, New Mexico, and I decided it was finally time I stopped in at the Mesalands Dinosaur Museum, whose billboards I’d seen along I-40 numerous times on drives between SoCal and Oklahoma. Mesalands Dinosaur Museum is run by Mesalands Community College, which has a metalworking program and a bronze foundry. Evidently a lot of students cast fossils in bronze, and a good chunk of the museum exhibits are made of bronze — including the cast of MWC 861 above on the right.

This is the appropriate reaction to putting your grubby mitts on real sauropod bones that were really bitten by real theropods.

Why is my big dumb hand in the photos? When our theropod bite mark paper came out last fall (Lei et al. 2023), it stirred up some media interest, and one request I was not prepared for was for photos of the bite marks with a hand in for scale. I had a few, mostly of CM 555 (you can see those here), but to my immense irritation, I’d never taken any photos of the much-more-impressive MWC 861 and MWC 4011 with my hands in the shots for scale. I’ve now rectified that oversight.

Incidentally, Gaston Design sells casts of the ischium, MWC 4011, both the whole bone and just the bitten distal end. I picked up one of the latter while passing through Fruita. Do not judge Rob Gaston’s work by this particular cast, which is unfinished. Rob warned me in advance that he hadn’t time to finish the painting and antiquing, but I could have the cast anyway if I was interested. He also gave me a ton of advice on how to finish it myself, which I will be attempting in the future. In the meantime, yay! New toy!

So if you’re driving through Colorado on I-70, stop in Dinosaur Journey to see and touch some pretty amazing specimens. And if you’re driving through New Mexico on I-40, stop in the Mesalands Dinosaur Museum and do the same.

Reference

Lei R, Tschopp E, Hendrickx C, Wedel MJ, Norell M, Hone DWE. 2023. Bite and tooth marks on sauropod dinosaurs from the Morrison Formation. PeerJ 11:e16327 http://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.16327